Gyotaku: Part VI

I is for Impression.  Collage by Mary M Payne

This is my offering for the word "impression".  As you may have noticed I am choosing both English and French words to name my pieces.  My prof. agreed that that was fine by her.   In this piece you see the prints I did of the fish called Pageot (red pandora in English).   

I called this "Impression" so I could talk a little about Gyotaku (meaning "fish+stone  Impression" in Japanese). 

As I said, I wanted this series to be loose and deconstructed a bit so I left the tear in the paper and glued it down that way.  The background sheet was inked with spray bottles of two colors and I found out the hard way on this piece, that in order for the color not to leak through to the fish, I needed to "fix" it with hairspray (or another fixative).  I figured that out before I glued down the last fish....but hey... it's not a mistake...it's a variation.

E is for Endangered,  Collage  by Mary M Payne

This next poster is "E" for endangered.  It is here I talk about pollution on the story page at the end.   This collage was made with two overlapping prints ( cut out and fitted together) pulled from the gelli-plate.  I laid down string and a piece of netting ( it was around a dry sausage) along side the fish and coral silhouettes to give the idea of man-made pollutants tossed in the sea.  

N is for Neptune Grass. collage by Mary M Payne

Here is my offering for Neptune Grass.  Neptune Grass is prehistoric seaweed endemic to the Mediterranean Sea. Its growth is so slow that scientists estimate that a prairie of 15 square meters has been growing for thousands if not tens of thousands of years. However as you might have feared, populations are declining rapidly due to pollution.

  What I have depicted here are the balls made of vegetation sloughed off by the grasses which show up on beaches of the Mediterranean . 

 I printed these "balls" from a red cabbage cut in half and dipped in acrylic.   The background is a spattering of red and grey liquid acrylics sprayed from small bottles onto a piece of rice paper.